Rare co-founder Tim Stamper takes a cobwebbed Conker banner down from the studio's old Manor Farm barn, 27 years after the team left

The banner was covered in cobwebs. Tim Stamper took it down anyway, and rolled it up.

He did it on camera in a converted barn at Manor Farm, the old farm complex where Rare made its Nintendo 64 games. Time Extension reported that the building is known as the “Conker barn,” because the team that made Conker used it as a development studio. Stamper’s caption on X was a question: “Is this the only Conker banner left?”

@InTimsWorld's post on X

Rare started here. Tim and Chris Stamper sold their earlier company, Ultimate Play the Game, which had been based in nearby Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and set up Rare at Manor Farm. When the studio later moved into its current purpose-built base a short drive away on the A444, the banner stayed where it was. Time Extension puts that at “at least 27 years” ago, and notes the headline’s “almost 30 years” is looser than the evidence.

The article says the banner was apparently a promotional piece for live events such as E3. That fits the history: Conker started out in 1997 as Conker’s Quest, shown at E3 that June next to Banjo-Kazooie, and was renamed Twelve Tales: Conker 64 at E3 1998. Nobody in the coverage says which of those names, or which squirrel, is printed on the banner.

That is the odd part of the find. If the banner has hung since the move, it predates the game’s 2000 rebuild, which turned a child-friendly platformer into Conker’s Bad Fur Day. The banner could be a relic of a game Rare then deleted. Time Extension doesn’t say, and the video is where you would check.

The Stampers were famously secretive, and few outsiders ever saw inside Rare’s development offices. That is the real value of the clip: a look inside a studio’s working space that stayed shut for decades. Time Extension’s Damien McFerran writes that Manor Farm, which he believes is still owned by the Stamper family, “has clearly seen better days.”

A barn that held one of the best-known studios of its era sat there with the banner on the wall while the cobwebs moved in. (Cobwebs are the only tenants who never miss rent.)

Stamper frames this as part of something bigger. The article describes his effort to share archival material from Rare’s history, and his question on X, whether this is the only banner left, reads as a call to anyone else who kept one.

The banner is a small thing, a promotional piece found by the man who built the company. Nothing else from inside Rare’s old offices has been this visible in years, and the co-founder is the one showing it.

The cobwebs had a 27-year lease.